The semiconductor industry has been advanced to the field of Ultra Large Scale Integrated Circuit (ULSI) technologies. The fabrication of the nonvolatile memories also follows the trend of the reduction in the size of a device. The nonvolatile memories include various types of devices. Different types of devices have been developed for specific applications' requirements in each of these segments. Flash memory is one of the segments of nonvolatile memory devices. The device includes a floating gate to storage charges and an element for electrically placing charge in and removing the charges from the floating gate. One of the applications of flash memory is BIOS for computers. Typically, the high-density nonvolatile memories can be applied as the mass storage of portable handy terminals, solid-state camera and PC cards. It is because that the nonvolatile memories exhibit many advantages, such as memory retention without power, fast access time, low power dissipation in operation, and robustness.
The formation of nonvolatile memories toward the trends of low supply power and fast access, because these requirements are necessary for the application of the mobile computing system. Nonvolatile memory needs the charges to be hold in the floating gate for a long period of time. Therefore, the dielectric that is used for insulating the floating gate needs to be high quality in insulation and good durability in writing. At present, the low voltage nonvolatile memory is applied with a voltage of about 5V to 10V during charging or discharging the floating gate. As known in the art, the tunneling effect is a basic technology in charging or discharging. In order to attain high tunneling efficiency, the thickness of the dielectric between the floating gate and substrate have to be scaled down due to the supply voltage is reduced. The data program method of a non-volatile memory device includes a method using Fowler-Nordheim (FN) tunneling or a method using hot electron injection. In FN tunneling, a high voltage is applied to a control gate to induce a high electric field in a tunnel oxide layer, and electrons of a semiconductor substrate pass the tunnel oxide layer and are injected into a floating gate. During the mode of erasing, the bias may apply on the source to discharge the electron from the floating gate to the source of a memory device.
Currently, the SOC (system on chip) desires memory with high operation speed and integrated in one single chip. For example, the single polysilicon processing may integrate with other devices such as transistors. The typical nonvolatile memory employs stack gate memories by double polysilicon processing. One type of the memories uses trapping layer instead of floating gate (FG) to hold the carrier. The memory cells are constructed with a trapping ONO layer. The memory cell generally includes a P-type silicon substrate and two PN junctions between N+ source (or drain regions) and P type substrate, a nitride layer sandwiched between two oxide layers and a polycrystalline layer. To program or write the cell, voltages are applied to the drain and the gate and the source is grounded. These voltages generate an electric field along the length of the channel from the source to the drain. This electric field causes electrons to be drawn off the source and begin accelerating towards the drain. The hot electrons are generated at the boundary between drain and channel during the acceleration.
In the prior art, please refer to U.S. Pat. No. 4,881,108 U.S. Pat. No. 5,768,192 to Eitan B. entitled “Non-volatile semiconductor memory cell utilizing asymmetrical charge trapping”, filed on 16 Jun. 1998. The charge trapping memory may also be referred to U.S. Pat. No. 6,335,554 to Yoshikawau and Kuniyoshi, entitled “Semiconductor Memory”. The patent disclosed a memory with ONO structure. Further article teaches the memory with ONO stacked layer could also be found, please refer to the article, Chan, T. Y. et al, “A True Single-Transistor Oxide-Nitride-Oxide EEPROM Device,” IEEE Electron Device Letters, vol. EDL-8. No. 3, March 1987.